Are you dreading all the same old party games this Christmas? Fed up with charades? Had it with the hat game? Well then, be grateful for the crazy Bercow family, who have always bent over backwards (and in Mrs Bercow’s case, we now learn, also forwards) to make our lives more colourful, for bringing us a brand new game to entertain the family and help the turkey go down (as it were).
It’s coming to a drawing room near you this yuletide and it’s called Have You Shagged the Speaker’s Wife? What happens is every one gathers in a circle and dances round the drunkest man in the room, singing, to the tune of The Farmer Wants a Wife: “He’s had the Speaker’s wife, He’s had the Speaker’s wife, Ee, aye, addio, He’s had the Speaker’s wife . . .” Then a woman goes in the ring, and you all sing: “He found her on the Tube, Unconscious on the Tube, Ee, aye, addio, He’s had the Speaker’s wife . . .” And so on.
Because the word is, everyone has. But the only one shouting about it is ... the Speaker’s wife herself. For Sally Bercow has pulled a complete “Reverse Tiger” (as this manoeuvre of pre-emptive honesty will surely come to be known) and come clean, without anyone asking or being remotely interested, about all the sex she’s had with random strangers.
For absolutely no decent reason at all that I can think of, Sally Bercow, who I had previously thought of as tall, beautiful, totally unattainable and to be applauded for settling down with a midget weirdo (“wee John must be dynamite in bed and hung like a carthorse to have pulled that one”, we all thought) called the nation’s press into the Speaker’s apartment (by no means the first time, I suppose, that she has brought strange men home) and boasted of the Riley’s life that late she led.
“I was a big drinker in my twenties,” she began, no doubt winking, and offering round the sherry. “I started drinking at Oxford, being a party girl [smiles coyly at the youngest male hack and winks, just for him] and it got out of control.
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“I got a grip for a while [ooh, grip, lovely, firm grip] ... but I was working in advertising and I would drink at lunch, then go out and drink a bottle in the evening; most evenings really. I had no stop button. [You want to push my button, don’t you?] Well, OK. It was sometimes more like two bottles, except I promised John I wouldn’t say that. [But I can trust you to keep this to yourself, can’t I? What my husband doesn’t know can’t hurt him. You don’t mind if I just sit myself down right here, do you? Tell me if that’s too close.] “I’d fall asleep on the Tube and end up in Epping or Heathrow,” the lawful wife of the Speaker of the mother of Parliaments went on. “I would end up sometimes at a bar and someone would send a drink over, and I’d think: why not? And we’d go home together. I liked not knowing how a night was going to end . . .”
Ye gods, woman, why ON EARTH are you telling us this? What in the world is wrong with you? Everyone has a past, and is entitled to it, and whatever you did there (for it is another country), as long as it was legal, can be left there and not compromise your status as a “lady”. God knows, the only truly beloved Speaker of the modern era was a former dancing girl — and I’ll bet Betty could have drunk you under the table — but she never chose to volunteer the fruitier details of that nocturnal life, if indeed there were any. We’ll never, thank heavens, know.
Sure, some naughty stuff might get dragged out if you get famous. But you can always, always, choose to remain aloof. And nobody will call you a slag to your face. But if you bring it up yourself, and make a joke of it (“I promised John I wouldn’t say that [titters coyly]”) then you make yourself fair game. And male journalists less well brought-up than I — and, God help you, female ones, who are far more vindictive — will be free to call you whatever they choose.
What were you thinking of? You say: “I want to run for Parliament as a Labour candidate so this has all got to come out.” Have you misunderstood? Did you think in some way that you have to be a drunken, sexually incontinent waster to be an MP? Because you don’t.
It’s just that they usually are. But we, the voters, are bang up for a couple of decent, clean-living ones now. Or didn’t your husband tell you? That’s what he’s supposed to be there for.
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Or were you, perhaps, hoping to underline very clearly in the public mind your transition from a Tory wife to a Labour politician, and thought that bragging about your boozed-up bonkathons was the most efficient way?
Were you thinking that it was maybe a good way of shedding the pearls-and-twinset image and getting in with all those scary feminist dragons of the Left? Did you imagine that Harriet Harman and Caroline Flint and their pals would shake their heads sideways, Oprah-style, and point at you and say, “You GO girl! Name your constituency!”
Or were you, as I’m sure is most likely, hoping that by telling your story now you would pre-empt, maybe even head off, at the very least defuse, future revelations by your cohorts of lovers? It worked up to a point for Belle de Jour, but by comparison with your antics, she comes out looking like Ann Widdecombe.
Indeed, I think the only reason we can be certain that you didn’t do it with Tiger Woods is that having seen his taste in suntanned Las Vegas hostesses it is hard to imagine the world’s greatest golfer on the Central Line after midnight, trawling the Hainault loop for unconscious PR girls.
I, on the other hand ... I’ve made the occasional late-night misjudgment. I’m exactly the same age as you. We were at Oxford at the same time (except that I was actually there). I have never been a terrible slag — alas — and my numbers are unlikely to be anywhere up near yours (to be honest, I’ve had barely a Cleggful), but there were indeed one or two, I blushingly confess (because I have no plans to run for office), whose names and faces I don’t remember.
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What if I was one of your scalps? What if you’re that tall bird who followed me home from the Groucho in 1999 and wouldn’t take no for an answer, then stole my wallet when I fell asleep on the job? Does that compromise me as a commentator on future Labour governments (should you ever be part of one)? And if it was you, Mrs Bercow, can I have the wallet back now, please?
It’s not the money — I’m sure you just needed it for a taxi — it’s the sentimental value. That wallet was a present from an MP’s wife ... but that’s another story.